Shostakovich: Cello Concertos review

Published 3:01 pm, Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Shostakovich Classical

The fervid, high-octane performance style of cellist Alisa Weilerstein is a mixture that’s not necessarily to all tastes, or even to one taste all of the time. Yet at her finest, Weilerstein brings a rare and combustible eloquence to a range of repertoire, and her new recording of the two Shostakovich concertos with conductor Pablo Heras-Casado is often powerful and even mesmerizing. (Weilerstein and Heras-Casado join forces with the San Francisco Symphony this week for the Schumann concerto.) The First Concerto gets an agile and athletic reading here, full of dark energy and crisp rhythms, but it also has a hectoring edge as well as the tonal rawness that is a Weilerstein trademark. The real glory of the disc is the Second Concerto, which is far less often performed but which emerges from this account as the quirkier, more profound and more original of the two works. Weilerstein and Heras-Casado make the broad first movement into an exquisitely personal rhapsody, at once introspective and urgent; the puckish feints and mood switches of the final movement sound surprisingly cogent. — Joshua Kosman

SHOSTAKOVICH

CELLO CONCERTOS

ALISA WEILERSTEIN;

BAVARIAN RADIO SYMPHONY

DECCA

$18.99

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